Achieving Serenity

The source of misery

Ever since he was a child, Michael dreamed of becoming a renaissance man. He was a very gifted individual who excelled academically and was able to pick up new skills quickly. The feeling of having impressed another person was an emotion that Michael craved. He would display his talents for his core group of friends, and whatever they responded to most was what Michael chose to focus on.

He began smoking marijuana daily when he became a sophomore in high school. Noticing the drug's ability to expand his creativity, Michael sought after the weed and began treating it like it was his magical potion; Popeye's spinach. Upon graduating high school, Michael knew that whatever path he chose to take in college was going to offer him great opportunities for success. He simply felt too talented to fail.

He decides to keep his major fairly generic with the open mind of possibly switching majors in the future. Michael starts going to a community college to study business and after the first year, he is getting consecutive straight A's despite his continual marijuana habit.

During weekends Michael parties with his friends, often drinking and smoking until the sun arose the next morning. Poker was also beginning to become a favorite among the college students, and like everything else he took on, Michael was determined to master it. He researches online of the many other young men who have become millionaires playing poker. He starts to feel as if becoming a professional poker player may be in his future.

Michael began using his free time to gamble online, analyzing the tendencies of adversaries and the statistical odds of making winning hands. The online poker gradually becomes the main focus in Michael's mind as his isolation and drug use increased. He finds himself playing online poker during class, and his grades begin to suffer an inevitable decline. Shortly before completing two years at the college, Michael drops out to play poker full time.

At this point in his life, Michael had a wide variety of valuable skills but none quite polished enough to make him a living. He is using the majority of his profits from poker to finance his marijuana habit, and when he does the math he sees he is not profiting. Several years pass and Michael has no choice but to ask his parents if he can move back in with him. It appeared he was too reckless with his gambling to ever play lucratively, and he was now in crushing debt with credit card companies. Michael begins attending Gamblers Anonymous meeting per his parents' mandate, and he decides to swear off gambling for good.

Having wasted over seven years of his life pursuing poker and losing all his friends along the way, Michael reminisces on his past decisions as he sits in his lonely bed inside the bedroom he grew up in, feeling the weak high from his tolerated weed abuse. He was thirty-one years old and had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. The only thing that he truly looked forward to was smoking more weed. His parents were now willing to help him pay for the weed because they felt it was helping with his depression.

Michael is a talented guitarist, pianist, drummer, and rapper and has recorded several songs. He can do a kick-flip on a skateboard, can build websites from scratch, knows how to take apart and put together a car engine and can do the same with a desktop computer. He has written novels, has an exceptional numeric memory and can create software that uses the entire internet as a database. He knows the entire hydroponics process of growing a marijuana plant. When he takes a look at his history, Michael realizes that whatever he puts his mind to- he has the power to excel at it. The problem is that today he is so lonely that he doesn't have any external feedback to motivate him. The only reason he adopted such a wide variety of skills was to impress the various people he met along his journey. Now that he was alone and didn't have the feedback, Michael wanted to give up.

He was good at a lot of things, but great at nothing and the reason why was simple- any time he faced any resistance, Michael would give up. He wasn't willing to work for anything unless he was praised for it. His music went nowhere because eventually, he wasn't getting enough praise or attention so he picked another path. His programming and mechanical skills went nowhere because he only worked on those things when there was immediate gratification involved in the project.

Great artists succeed because they are focused, and continue to do what they love for years despite negative feedback or worse- no feedback at all. Michael dreamed of utilizing his talents to become a modern day renaissance man; an artist beloved by all. He lacked the focus and resilience to keep moving even when nobody's watching.

After almost two decades of smoking marijuana daily, Michael enters rehab in desperation to find a new way to live. He learns that the weed was never expanding his creativity, but only creating within him a burdensome craving. Marijuana wasn't the solution to his problems- it was the direct cause. Upon finishing the program, Michael enters a halfway house and begins taking his sobriety seriously, as serious as he once was to find and maintain means of scoring weed. He goes back to school to study computer programming and stays on the path even on the days when he feels his life may be heading nowhere.

Michael releases his own will and prays to receive God's will and the power to carry it out. He was driving himself insane trying to find serenity with his own personalized method and was ready to surrender to a different way of living. His best thinking got him to a stagnate state of misery, and so he decided to follow the advice from the people whom he felt had something he wanted. His new, focused path finally brought Michael a network of happiness. Family, recovery and a stable job grounded him to a euphoric sense of everlasting serenity.